Five grad students earn Ohio State Presidential Fellowships

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Several Buckeye engineers have earned the highest honor given by The Ohio State University Graduate School—a Presidential Fellowship.

This award honors the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project.

The College of Engineering’s Spring 2020 Presidential Fellows are Kaiyi Ji, Daniel Lepkowski, Towhidur Razzak, Ming Yang and Chaoshun Zuo.

Kaiyi Ji
Ji

Kaiyi Ji is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Advised by Professor Yingbin Liang, Ji’s research goals are to develop fast, principled, scalable optimization algorithms for modern large-scale machine learning and deep learning applications such as computer vision, pattern recognition and online advertising. His work aims to provides fundamental theories for popular deep learning models as guidelines to develop improved algorithms with performance guarantee.

Daniel Lepkowski
Lepkowski

Daniel Lepkowski is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus on semiconductor materials and devices. He is advised by Professor Steven Ringel in the Electronic Materials and Devices Laboratory. Lepkowski's research aims to enable next-generation solar cells that achieve higher efficiencies at costs similar to present day technologies. To date his efforts have demonstrated world record efficiencies of >23% and enabled a near-term pathway towards achieving >30% efficient solar cells.

Towidur Razzak
Razzak

Towhidur Razzak is an electrical and computer engineering PhD candidate working on realizing next-generation semiconductor devices for communications and energy efficiency applications. His work has enabled key advances in semiconductor device design that aided state-of-art ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor devices. Razzak is advised by Professor Siddharth Rajan.

Ming Yang

Ming Yang is a mechanical engineering PhD candidate, advised by Professor Soheil Soghrati. His research focuses on creating an efficient numerical framework, including microstructure reconstruction, mesh generation, finite element simulation, and deep learning algorithms, for the computational modeling of novel materials with complex microstructures. His framework will significantly reduce the time and labor cost associated with the modeling process, and can impact all engineering disciplines by facilitating the numerical investigation of novel material behaviors.

Chaoshun Zuo
Chaoshun Zuo

Chaoshun Zuo is a PhD candidate advised by Professor Zhiqiang Lin in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research focuses on mobile security with an emphasis on exploring both static and dynamic program analysis of mobile applications to systematically identify various security vulnerabilities in the backends (e.g., a cloud server) including the ones that can result in massive data breaches.

Awarded competitively, Presidential Fellowships provide one year of full-time financial support so students can complete their dissertations or terminal degree projects unimpeded by other duties. Competitions are held during autumn and spring semesters.

by Meggie Biss, College of Engineering Communications | biss.11@osu.edu

Categories: StudentsAwards